Are You Ready For Trouble?
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When I was in school, in my project management course, I truly felt enlightened when we studied risk management. Since the 9/11 tragedy the awareness for this topic has grown considerably, but I’m willing to bet that most small and micro businesses are still using the ostrich approach to risk.
There is an excellent online resource to at least acquaint us with risk management as it applies to small business. Included are easy-to-use template and checklists. I really liked the business continuity section.
You’ll also want to check out the Cyber Security section, and download the Internet Security Alliance Cyber Security Guide.
Last summer the server company where we had our niche sites hosted became the target of some not so friendly cyber terrorists. Every morning I woke up to see a different horrific graphic where my home page was supposed to be. All in all the damage was limited to cost of lost earnings, which in the overall scheme of things is minor. But it did get me thinking about the realities of the web and what it means to be doing business there.
Eventually we had to change hosting companies and one of the other things we did was get 3 different hosting accounts and divide the sites up among the 3 servers. These companies were chosen not only for their reputation for quality services but also for their physical location. One is in the northeast U.S., the other in Texas and the third in California. Risk mitigation by through diversification. I figured the worst that can happen is that 1/3 of the business can be down at once.
And if that does happen, in a serious way, I can transfer DNS settings in less than a day and be up and running again.
The other biggie on the topic of business risk management: backups. Don’t rely on your hosting company to be able to recover lost files. Have your own backups.
Another one: What happens if your home gets broken into and your computer is stolen? What have you lost? If your answer is a lot…or even everything, then you need a plan. For me, I have an extra [or external] hard drive that I can dump everything on to and then take it to my office [off site backups are the best].
My hope is that I’ve got you thinking about a topic that is very easy to push to the back burner. Risk management is not something that you really get perfect.
Crash course in risk management:
- Sit down and write a list of all the obvious risks that face your business
- Give each one a number from 1 to 10 for likelihood that it will happen [10 is the most likely]
- Give each one a number from 1 to 10 for the impact to your business if it did happen [10 is the most devastating]
- Multiply the two numbers - call this number the Risk Level
- Sort the list by Risk Level
- Start at the top of list and identify a risk mitigation or avoidance strategy for each item
- Try and put in place your risk mitigation plans, a little bit each day, starting from the top of the list
- Hope you never need to use any of your plans!